“Wipe away the blood and hold the fabric of his shirt away from the wound,” Tamara said, and I obeyed without thinking. Indigo’s skin was cold. Tamara looked at his side, then at the machine, then she knelt down and braced one hand against his sternum and with the other she held the device over the deep gashes in his side.

Bit by bit, artificial flesh closed the wounds. It looked plasticky, oddly pinkish against Indigo’s blue-white pallor. She moved his skin too soon once, and the wound tore open against the sim flesh again, and she had to do it all over.

At long last, all four gouges had been filled. Indigo lay deeply unconscious and covered in three types of drying blood between us. He didn’t react when I patted his cheek and called his name.

Tamara asked again, “Is he breathing?”

He was, lightly. I could feel it against my wrist. “Yeah,” I said.

She set the medical device aside. It rattled emptily. Nobody else get injured, I remembered saying, right before the manikins had started chasing us.

“Are you okay?” Lantern-Eyes asked. A strand of her hair was clinging to her bony jaw with dried black blood.

“Yeah. I’m okay.”

“Okay,” Tamara said, then, in a voice that shook, “Okay.”

She pulled up her knees, wrapped her arms around them, then hid her face in her arms.

I shrugged off my pack. I’d forgotten I was wearing it, but as soon as it was free, ignored pain sprung up in both shoulders. Aside from that ache, and some bruising, though, I was uninjured. Tamara was bleeding, bruised all down one side of her face, and Indigo was unconscious with hardly any blood left in his body, but I was fine.

“Did you mean it?” I asked. “When you promised him not to catch a Minister?”

She lifted her head and wiped at her cheeks with one dirty hand. “Yeah,” she said, and the word came out wet and unsteady.

I found that the last thing in the world I wanted at that moment was to see iron-lady Lantern-Eyes cry. I dug the last flashlight out of my pack, and stood up.

“We probably left a blood trail leading right here,” I said. “I’m going to clean it up so nothing follows us in.”

She nodded, and I unlocked the door and left.

I shrugged off my jacket, which had been sliced open in the back by a manikin’s claws anyway, and used it to mop up the trail of Indigo’s blood. That same blood was drying down my front, on my shirt and down my pants, stiffening as I walked.

I followed the blood trail across the empty server room and back out to the hall, and followed our path back down the hall a little bit as well, just to be sure. And because I didn’t want to return, just yet, to Indigo half-dead and Lantern-Eyes grieving, the horrible sinking pit in my gut that knew we couldn’t kill each other when the time came, but that we would have to anyway.